Rethinking Contexts Rereading Texts

This volume brings together ten essays on the various contexts for texts that social-scientific approaches invoke. These contexts are: the cultural values that inform the writers of texts, the relationship between the text and the reader or community of readers, and the production of texts themselves as social artifacts. In the first, predominantly theoretical, section of the book, John Rogerson applies the perspective of Adorno to the reading of biblical texts; Mark Brett advocates methodological pluralism and deconstructs ethnicity in Genesis; and Gerald West explores the 'graininess' of texts. The second part contains both theory and application: Jonathan Dyck draws a 'map of ideology' for biblical critics and then applies an ideological critical analysis to Ezra 2. M. Daniel Carroll R. reexamines 'popular religion' and uses Amos as a test case; Stanley Porter considers dialect and register in the Greek of the New Testament, then applies it to Mark's Gospel. This is an original as well as wide-ranging exploration of important social-scientific issues and their application to a range of biblical materials.

Text, Context and the Johannine Community adopts a new approach to the social context of the Johannine writings by drawing on modern sociolinguistic theory. Sociolinguistics emphasizes language as a social phenomenon, which can be analysed with reference not only to its broad context of culture, but also, through the use of register analysis, to its narrower context of situation. The Johannine writings have increasingly been seen as the product of a distinct Johannine Community, depicted by some scholars as a sectarian group, opposed both to wider Jewish society and to other Christian groups. This model has largely been constructed on historical-critical grounds, yet given our lack of reliable external information about the origin of the Johannine writings, a more fruitful approach may be to examine their lexico-grammatical and discourse features to determine what these imply about interpersonal relationships. This study compares selected 'narrative asides' from the Gospel of John with a passage section from 1 John and with the two shorter Johannine Epistles. It concludes that register analysis of these texts does not support the idea of a close-knit sectarian group.

Fewster develops the theory of lexical monosemy, in a systemic-functional linguistic framework, and disputes concensus readings of κτίσις as nature in Romans 8.

In The Multilingual Jesus and the Sociolinguistic World of the New Testament, Hughson Ong provides a comprehensive study of the sociolinguistic dynamics that compose the speech community of ancient Palestine, including its historical linguistic shifts and geographical linguistic landscape.

Written at a time when his ideas and practices were provoking opposition even from fellow Christians, the Apostle Paul articulates in his Letter to the Romans his understanding of God’s plan for humanity and discusses the implications of this plan for different groups of people. Romans is considered by many as the most theologically significant and sophisticated book of the Bible. This volume is designed to bridge the gap between studying Romans as an academic enterprise and experiencing how Romans can speak today in the life of the church. All of the chapters in this volume—especially those devoted to the content of Romans—were written with both exegesis and application in mind. All of the contributors to this volume believe that Romans has a crucial voice within the church today and that those who preach, teach, and study the book need to be attentive to its witness and to its timeliness.

Modeling Biblical Language collects the best linguistic scholarship of present and former members of the McMaster Divinity College Linguistics Circle, addressing a variety of interpretive and theoretical issues facing Old/New Testament studies from the perspective of modern linguistic theory.

Suffering and death are two topics that are frequently referred to in the Epistle to the Hebrews, but have rarely been examined within scholarship on this important New Testament text. Dyer redresses the balance in this study of these topics, conducting a thorough investigation using semantic domain analysis. He incorporates recent advancements in modern linguistics, in particular the 'context of situation', and then connects these topics to the social situation addressed in Hebrews. In so doing he is able to reveal how the author is responding to the reality of suffering in the lives of his audience. With this awareness, it becomes clear how the author also responds to his audience's pain by creating models of endurance in suffering and death. These serve to motivate his audience toward similar endurance within their own social context. Dyer shows that it is possible to make significant determinations about the social setting of Hebrews based upon an examination and analysis of the language used therein.

In this commentary on the book of Amos, Daniel Carroll combines a detailed reading of the Hebrew text with attention to its historical background and current relevance. What makes this volume unique is its special attention to Amos’s literary features and what they reveal about the book’s theology and composition. Instead of reconstructing a hypothetical redactional history, this commentary offers a close reading of the canonical form against the backdrop of the eighth century BCE.